Many helipads are non-instrumented and situated in crowded or remote areas. Certain phases of helicopter operations such as approach, landing and/or take-off from such helipads may present significant challenges. For example, although onboard applications such as synthetic vision systems (“SVS”) may offer situational awareness to helicopter pilots (e.g., SVS may render and/or display virtual terrain), such systems typically depend upon the accuracy of terrain, obstacle and/or navigation database information. In certain instances, data stored within one or more of these databases may come from one or more sources. This may impact the accuracy of displayed navigational or terrain data, as provided by the SVS.
To illustrate, a helicopter display may render an elevated helipad. Depending upon the accuracy of the data stored by a navigation database, (which may store, among other data, helipad location data) and/or an obstacle database (which may store, among other data, structure location data) a spatial misalignment between the location of the helipad and the location of the structure may occur. This may result in an inaccurate representation of upcoming obstacle structures and helipad on top of it, as determined by the SVS. Often, as a result, a helicopter pilot may be required rely on certain visual cues to compensate for any such misalignment.
It would therefore be desirable to have an onboard or offline system that determines and/or indicates structure and helipad misalignment. It would also desirable to develop a system that corrects and/or compensates for such misalignment